Stories That Grow Like Mould
Written by Blaise Gilburd
Photography by Elizabeth Hunt
My stories are stories of the winter and the cold. Atlantic stories drenched in salt water and wind-torn, they sit on the coast broken upon till they break up and fall away. They thrive as the sunset begins to eat more of the day and the year begins to come to an end. The summer heat is oppressive to them, it drains the moisture from their veins. In the glare and un-ending days they tire, wither and shrink; only to appear in months with mushrooms, in the mulch and the damp. People find them trekking through wet grass under a foreboding cloud, watching the hems of their jeans darken with wet. They grow from the sticky mix of purple juice and blood-coating hands gone picking blackberries. These stories stick low to the ground, they crawl and slide and slither. Sometimes these stories scare me, they kill through suffocation and at times the warmth of decay feels very much like an embrace. They hang around me in various forms of rot, parts falling off them and trailing behind on the ground. A putrid smell accompanies them, but I have grown blind to it. My stories are too easy to greet and they settle comfortably into an armchair, dropping ashes on the rug as they fall asleep. They put me at ease with a log fire and waft in the smell of charcoal and dirt. In the dance of the flames things begin to grow, little cracks where there is only shadow and dandelions forcing their heads through the floor. Ivy and briars thorned and thick as a forearm wrap their way around door frames and push up the floorboards. As things disappear into the green; the stories will always seek to distract, yet they still have their little moments of beauty, throwing up the blossoms, the berries and the bones.
They grow with the sound of a low, quiet thrum; throbbing like a pulse in my ear-bed. It builds as they pull together their weight and form like compost in warmth and darkness. It is a comfort though, that warmth and the noise. Rather than ice, smog has descended and their edges are crusted with black and soot. They give off the heat of too many layers on a December day, hot breathing from underarms. It is the feeling of a bead of sweat travelling down the rounds of the spine and leaving an itchy trail. They like to linger like a breath on the back of your neck, more often than not just out of reach until the moment you are trying to fall asleep when they rear their heads. They are like the hairs in the jam of the toast gone face down on the carpet, sticking to the roof of your mouth; pulpy and cottony and suffocating in the throat and too hard to swallow. The writing keeps me awake till it can find its way to the page, but when I am already kept awake by the heat it is limp and sad; damp with sweat, tired and upset.
The summer does not work, and I do not work for the summer. I cannot work in the summer, it is all frustration and headaches and leaves gone brown and crumbling. The stories are honeycombed and soft, like wood when the dry rot sets in. I push on them too hard and more often than not they splinter and break and show only the beetle-filled hollow within. The summer is all weighty storms on the horizon, these cracks of thunder and downpours which seem like a farce in the face of the Atlantic’s black storms. The things that happen in the summer are slow and shallow like the stagnating pools on the side of the road slowly emptying of water. Amoeba multiplying and multiplying and multiplying and multiplying and multiplying and: the red blood-algae that spreads itself over the water’s surface and blocks out the sun. The red blood-algae that eats the oxygen from the water and suffocates the fish. July is the cruellest month, in how it simulates the autumn and the leaves die early. Parched earth and parched trees which begin to creak and bend towards the dusty ground. Grasses turn brown, shrivel up and blow away on the wind. A general desertification of the soul. Summer’s blood is a thin viscous thing, the real thick crude stuff comes coursing from hard winter earth. Fracked like the oil which chokes the heart out of this planet, an aspect that the summer will never let you forget. Now it is a reminder, the summer functions solely as a memento mori for the slow march of our species. The heat and the humidity of storms just waiting to erupt on us and the growing spots of blight on the plants squirming in the heat.
The stories come with the wind, cold and dropping from the hills on the horizon as it spills with the clouds into the valley. It is still warm and wet when the fungi set about consuming the corpses of summer’s rule. Fat caps growing from the piles of brown grass cuttings under the pines, turning shiny and sticky. The shadows grow long once again and the minutes seem to carry more consequence than the cheap pocket-change months since passed. Even each step down the gravel path has more depth. The days are shorter and there is a greater sense of the need to be productive with the sunlight afforded to us. Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is a predator crouched in the grass, creeping closer and closer and ready to take you when you grow complacent. It is in response to this that the stories come about, lit up by the wet shine of headlights rushing through the rain. And the rain, all it takes is the rain. The cardboard creak of wet jeans and the squeak of wet socks in shoes and all this discomfort revive the stories from their hibernation. Dried bones and dusty hide reform and knit together and lay themselves out in the mud, a spread of velum which reads the warmth of the winter. It invites at last a settled sleep, smothered and comforted in a darkness which folds into itself like a sheet. Strata and layers like the black speckled peat eat the body and at last creation can develop.
